The only trouble with the happy task of diving into the touristic adventures of New York City is you will never get to the bottom of the 8 million stories awaiting in The Naked City aka the Big Apple. Even armed with the best of the Zagat’s, travel guides and a set of essays by Pico Iyer, Jan Morris and Tom Wolfe, and an encyclopedia of cinema mindset, New York is the infinite, bottomless ocean.

Virtually every nook and cranny of the city has a film or literary reference as well as a rich history of its own, so almost every famed landmark is accompanied by ghosts and a patina of the characters who have made history in its presence.

And so even its most famed attractions somehow escape the deathly grip of cliché. When you come into contact with the elegant lines of its buildings and monuments, given an aura by the way that light hits it, each of these magic places has an authentic presence that cannot be duplicated even by the masters of imitation in America’s other Capital of Dreams - Las Vegas.

The Statue of Liberty has acquired an even more resonant meaning to Americans and visitors alike after the tragedy of 9/11.

Grand Central Station was the setting to a pivotal scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest in which the murder suspect played by Cary Grant escapes a police dragnet.

Rockefeller Center is the home of NBC’s New York headquarters, and home to Saturday Night Live, Tina Fey’s Thirty Rock, The Today Show, and the Sex in the City movie. Its most distinctive art work is the golden statue of a reclining Prometheus giving fire to the world.

New York's Central Park, which has hosted countless movies as well as the New York City Triathlon, which holds its run on a road familiar to horse drawn carriages, skaters, cyclists and runners the rest of the year.

Behind an inspiring quote about peace etched in stone across the street lies the United Nations – a setting for films like North by Northwest and The Interpreter, as well as Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe banging tirade against the USA at the apex of the Cold War.

“The Knotted Gun” sculpture by Carl Fredrik Reutersward stands outside the United Nations Building on Manhattan and symbolizes the quixotic peacekeeping mission it set for itself.

The famed Dakota Apartment building at 72nd Street and Central Park West is home to artists and stars. It is most famous as the place where John Lennon was assassinated by a mentally disturbed nobody in 1980. Its eerie karma was best seen in scenes shot there by director Roman Polanski of his thriller Rosemary’s Baby.

Across the street from the Dakota lies Strawberry Fields, a plot of peaceful Central Park ground dedicated to Lennon’s most idealistic spirit. This inscription Imagine is adorned by flowers and visited by pilgrims every single day of the year.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 51st Street on Fifth Avenue is a famed neo Gothic edifice in which the funerals of Babe Ruth, Vince Lombardi and Robert F. Kennedy were held. It was used in the 2002 edition of Spider Man and in a key scene in Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright said his spiral masterpiece The Solomon Guggenheim Museum would make the nearby stodgy Metropolitan Museum of Art look like “a Protestant barn” by contrast. This home of Impressionist and modernist masters outshines its tenants as one of the world’s greatest works of architecture. So great that the producers of the recent thriller The International recreated the building’s interior in order to stage a shootout.

Artists sketch classical Greek statues in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A modern day, real-life moment recalling a scene from the Fred Astaire-Audrey Hepburn movie Funny Face (based on fashion photographer Richard Avedon.) This model laughs as she draws a small digital pocket camera in an impromptu shootout against the imposing lens of the professional – at Battery Park.

A woman in the gallery at the Museum of Modern Art is entranced by Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Starry Night.”

A man with a camcorder directs his girlfriend to mime the expression in the portrait of artist Frida Kahlo in a nearby mirror.

The Museum of Natural History presents a skeleton of a dinosaur with the longest neck in the world. The movie A Night at the Museum filmed the real exterior, but recreated the interior on a Vancouver sound stage.

The elegant Plaza Hotel was home to Kay Thompson’s and Hilary Knight’s fictional cutie, Eloise. When it opened, the Plaza offered rooms for $2.50. Today, visitors have to plunk down $3,750. The Beatles stayed there on their first US tour in 1964, and Truman Capote threw a renowned shindig there in 1966 – the famous Black and White masked ball in honor of Kay Graham.

View of the famed triangular Flatiron Building from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. That’s right, the star-crossed meeting place of lovers in Sleepless in Seattle and An Affair to Remember.

The view of Battery Park and surrounding buildings at the far south end of Manhattan, as seen from the John F Kennedy ferry to Staten Island.

An amusing moment shared by two friends under the neon lights of Broadway.

The pulse of perpetual nightlife under the neon lights of Times Square.